LANSING, Mich. – Sen. John McCain, the presumed Republican presidential nominee, picked up a total of 50 GOP national convention delegates from Michigan and Louisiana on Saturday.

Republicans met in both states to resolve how to divvy up delegates to the national convention in September.

Thirty-two of Louisiana’s 47 delegates said they intend to vote for McCain, and another three are also expected to back him. The McCain campaign said 43 of Louisiana’s delegates have signed pledges to vote for McCain.

Likewise, a majority of Michigan’s presidential delegates also said they’ll back the Arizona senator now that primary winner Mitt Romney is out of the race, although it’s still unclear how many will go to the national convention. Counting just the 30 Michigan delegates allowed so far, 23 were supposed to go to Romney, who won Michigan’s Jan. 15 primary. Although those delegates technically will go the Sept. 1-4 Republican National Convention in St. Paul uncommitted to any candidate, 18 now say they’ll back McCain.

As a result, McCain has 903 delegates nationally, according to an Associated Press tally. Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee has 245, while Romney’s total dropped to 253. A total of 1,191 are needed to secure the nomination.

– Associated Press

Clinton aide argues to seat delegates

WASHINGTON – Harold Ickes, a top adviser to Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton’s campaign who voted for Democratic Party rules that stripped Michigan and Florida of their delegates, now is arguing against the very penalty he helped pass.

In a conference call Saturday, the longtime Democratic Party member contended the DNC should reconsider its tough sanctions on the two states, which held early contests in violation of party rules. He said millions of voters in Michigan and Florida otherwise would be disenfranchised – before acknowledging moments later that he had favored the sanctions.

Campaigning in Wisconsin after Ickes’ remarks, Clinton echoed his contention that a suitable arrangement could be worked out to seat the Michigan and Florida delegations.

Ickes explained that his different position essentially is due to the different hats he wears as both a DNC member and a Clinton adviser in charge of delegate counting. Clinton won the primary vote in Michigan and Florida, and now she wants those votes to count.

As of Saturday, the delegate count stood at 1,280 for Obama and 1,218 for Clinton.

If the DNC were to award Michigan and Florida’s 313 delegates based on the vote in their primaries, she would be ahead, because she won both states.

– Associated Press

California ironing out primary ballots

SAN FRANCISCO – It has been nearly two weeks since primary day in California, and Stephen Weir is still ironing ballots.

Like many of his counterparts across the state, Weir, the registrar in Contra Costa County, east of San Francisco, is still counting votes from the Feb. 5 election; and, because of the weight and fold of some of the absentee ballots, Weir said he and his staff often have to steam them to allow them to be fed into vote-counting machines.

“Last election, the clerk ironed about 13,000 ballots,” Weir said. “There’s a setting just below ‘cotton’ and just above ‘wool’ that works pretty well. ‘Silk’ is also a really good setting.”

Election officials say a combination of high turnout, technology flaws and millions of mailed-in and dropped-off ballots have led to painstakingly slow returns in some counties, with nearly 800,000 ballots remaining to be processed.

Despite the slow returns, the results are not in question. Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton won the Democratic primary, and Sen. John McCain easily won on the Republican side.

Still, because Democrats appropriate delegates by percentage, the tally might have an impact. Art Torres, the state Democratic chairman, said this week that he hoped Los Angeles could “find a way to count those votes” and solve the problems before the next state election, which will be in June.

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